“What the hell was that about?” I said.
“Don’t look back there,” she said. “Come on.”
We exited the park and sought refuge in a dark Irishy sports bar a block south of NYU—mounted TVs showing SportsCenter, a scrum of freestanding tables beside the bar, a wall-hugging row of high-backed vinyl booths, unaccountably sticky, each with a dim green hanging pool lamp over a thick slab of dark-wood table. It was against one of these that I slapped the weighted rectangular packet I’d removed from my waistband. An encased iPhone. It looked new, newish. Alex plucked it off the table.
“Turn it off,” she said. “They’ve got these tracking things now. Oh, wait, oh wow, this genius didn’t even set a passlock.”
“What the fuck are you doing, Alex?”
“Restoring to…factory settings…now…and now…done.”
The screen that had dimly etched the lines of Alex’s face went dark and the face with it. She put the phone in her pocket and laced her fingers together on the tabletop.
“You know what I meant,” I said. “What are you guys doing?”
“Yes,” she said, “I know what you meant.”
Again her eyes shot away from me and I followed them to the door of the bar—it closed slowly and heavily, restoring the gloom as a middle-aged man in a ponytail shuffled over to the barstools. A minute later Alex’s eyes did the same wary tracking and this time the door admitted Sam in blue jeans, a thin gray sweatshirt, the top half of long johns, it looked like, and a rather bulging backpack that slung off him like a reverse kangaroo pouch. He’d lost the sunglasses, the pulled-down beanie, and in their place he wore a crooked, triumphal smile. He slid into the booth beside Alex and kissed her on the temple.
“I get your adrenaline up?”
“You’re such an amateur,” she said, fighting a smile of her own.
“Proudly, proudly.” He turned to me. “Old buddy old pal, how have you been? Jamaal told us about your engagement—congrats, mazel tov, many happy returns. Oh, and thanks for the help back there. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“What are you guys doing?” I said again. “You’re common thieves now?”
“Common thieves,” Alex scoffed. “Do you hear this guy? At least we have a cause to expropriate for, Eli. What do you have—mood swings? Judge not lest ye be judged, am I right?”
“Good God. Sam really has worn off on you, hasn’t he?”
My old friend looked taken aback at this, pulling his head back, literally, on his neck, turtle-like. The progress of the last several months seemed to have pushed the tide of his hairline noticeably farther up his forehead, hollowing out the pool of his cowlick bald patch that much more, the place where his cowlick used to be. When he looked up from the table I could see his jaw sharpening, the small fibrous muscles twitching through a swallow.
“We haven’t seen each other in a while,” Sam said. “Some things have obviously changed, but it’s good to see you. Congratulations on your engagement.”
“Thank you.”
“What else is new? How’s the dissertation coming? Sensitive question?”
“Sam,” I said, “Alex, I need to know why you’re stealing phones from hapless undergraduates.”
“They’ll be fine,” Alex said. “Send an e-mail to Mom and Dad and a new phone’s in the mail same day. These trust-fund kids…” Alex’s face went bright with remembering and she turned to Sam, taking his hand with a thoughtless easy intimacy. “Your Doogie Howser today didn’t even set a password lock on his phone.”
“You already wiped it?”
“We can post it tonight.”
Sam reached under the booth and from the squeal of zippers produced three more phones. He dealt them neatly onto the table in front of him, one beside the next beside the next, bracketing them with his forearms.
“A good day then,” he said to Alex, though really he was looking at me. “One of them’s locked, but let Jamaal work his magic and who knows…”
“Wow,” said Alex. “Impressive trawl.”
Sam hadn’t removed his eyes from me when he said, “We can get up to four hundred for a phone in good condition. Jamaal jimmies with the ones we pick up locked. Tiffany posts to an online marketplace from a safe IP address—she knows computers too, apparently.”
“Tiffany’s in on this?”
“You haven’t seen her around campus much either, have you?”
“Adam’s in too. ASU Jason came out last summer after he graduated,” Alex added.
“Why are you telling me all this?” I said. “What happened to mooching off family and friends, getting our parents to put money in the mail same day?”
“That’s not adequate anymore,” Sam said. “And for me expropriation is the only way I can contribute. My folks haven’t exactly been openhanded since my first arrest.”
“Your first arrest?”
Sam looked to Alex, raising his shoulders and eyebrows in subtle tandem.
“The reason we’re telling you this,” Alex said, “is because we miss you. We really do want you on board. What are you accomplishing with all those motions and sober discussions at ISO meetings, all that impotent talk? We’ve got actual plans in the Group,” she said, tossing the stack of Socialist Workers to fan out on the table. “A lot more than hocking dead trees at NYU students, that’s for sure.”
“Like what?” I said.
“Are you in?” Alex said. “You could still keep on at Randolph if you really wanted to, though I don’t see why you’d want to at this point.”
Sam put in, “We’ve collected a decent little group out there—they’re all serious, good people. You’d like them.”
“Vanguards,” I said. “You guys sound like you’re putting together a party of amateur vanguards.”
“Which of those words is a dirty word?” Sam’s face approached another thought, then backed away from it. “You know what? We’re being way too sober about this. Let’s get some beers in us, catch up a bit—we are at a bar, aren’t we? First round’s on me?”
Sam raised his arm to flag a server as I reached my own across the table, slowly, with all the energy drained from it, with old battery acid sludging up my veins. I picked up one of the stolen phones, pressed the power button at the top and brought up a screensaver photo of two twentysomething men, lovers by the look of their smiles, their two smooth faces pressed together at the cheeks, their eyes tipping up for the camera.
“The happy couple,” I said, pushing the phone back to Sam, who fumbled quickly to turn it off again.
“Looks like we’re leaving,” he said.
“You’ll be sorely missed.”
“You’re a real prick sometimes, you know that?” Alex said to me.
I’d started into a slow clap, just loud enough. “Excellent work, guys. Really noble, important work. Hey guys?”
At the door they didn’t turn around.
I stayed on at the random sports bar for a beer or three or four—it was only polite to the server who’d arrived with his ordinary face to take my order. Probably a trust-fund face in disguise, in poor face.
Adrenaline must have propped me up, like a laboratory monster, to get me the rest of the way to the dinner with Jen’s parents that night—they were just sitting down when I arrived—but now when I think of the meal I remember almost nothing from it. Jim Daugherty survives as a pair of beige broad cheeks looming up from across the table, Evelyn Daugherty, paler-complected, gray-haired, a wavering smile at her lips…I remember the smile beginning to crack a little as I turned aside the questions about my dissertation, with bluff practiced quips, about the academic job market I was assumed to be preparing for, about the wedding Jen and I were assumed to be planning—
“What can you tell us, Eli?” Evelyn said at one point, or something like that. “You’re awfully slippery tonight.”
“I’m against positivism,” I think I said. “Just say no to the positive, no?”
On the train ride home Jen said to me—and this I remember distinctly, her voice a sort of jump-start to the stalling apparatus—“Are they such outlandish questions to ask? Are they really so prying?”
I heard the threat of water in her voice, a bed of hard stony gravel underneath it. “What?”
“It’s like you’re giving a deposition: ‘We can neither confirm nor deny that we’ve set a date. Those discussions are ongoing and private.’ ”
“Is that really what I sounded like?”
“They were making polite fucking conversation, Eli! They’re trying to get to know their future son-in-law!”
“I’ve had a really shitty day, Jen. I don’t want to talk about it right now—”
“Oh you’ve had a shitty day?”
“No, look, I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. Jen?”
She’d already turned her face away as a couple in their rain-sheened winter coats sat down beside us. Was it raining outside? I might have seen a tearful rivulet, too, in the L train’s dark reflecting window. I tried to talk to the back of Jen’s silent, unyielding head, leaning in close to that forest of scented hair. She never turned around.
When we got back to the apartment it was Mallory’s presence that now intervened—politesse like a gag order. Jen didn’t want to talk in the privacy of our bedroom. What if Mallory heard us? Didn’t mortified voices cut through walls?
Or maybe she’d just finished talking for the night.
For the next several hours, with the lights in the room dropping off one by one, all I heard was the buzz of intensifying rain through the open window. It was Jen’s long habit to leave the window at least a little ajar, rain or shine, night or day, winter, spring, summer, fall—much more important that the air should “circulate,” the thinking went, than that the heating or AC bills should stay low. I’d made the mistake of challenging this custom early on, a Daugherty ritual, apparently, a trait, deep-sunk in the family gene pool. She’d just always done it that way, she said. She couldn’t imagine getting to sleep in a shut-in room. And I should be grateful she wasn’t her father, known to put up a full window fan in full winter. Things could always be worse.
I sat at the foot of Jen’s bed—our bed—fully clothed, while Jen’s sleeping form hardly disturbed the smooth covers. I hadn’t been banished here, exactly; it was more like a self-exile, a self-quarantine. I needed to understand my own mind. How often had Jen hinted at a date herself, or tried to joke her way into the conversation, and how often had I diverted it to other topics, diverting her with a quip or two about bourgeois respectability, the race for a bread maker, a new dish set. Of course none of that actually accounted for my hesitation—I knew that much about myself. Nor was it the mulish, dumb-male commitment paralysis. On nights like this I felt closer to the truth as I narrowed my inward vision to that sludge of old battery acid climbing up my veins, rising like a dark hardening stuff through the tubes and byways to stuff up my heart. A hemlock of self-loathing, a sense of waste, in both senses of that word. I knew Jen could do better than me.
A rill of cold air sank in from the windowsill, pebbling my skin at the thought. In spite of precedent I covered up Jen’s exposed arched feet; she’d kicked off the covers again a moment later. On a typical night, I imagined that the bottom hem of the covers and sheets must have looked like a tangled trapezoid, slanting up sharply from left to right—left was my side of the bed, right was Jen’s.
A sudden panic seized me— If I should ever lose her…
I moved to the little alcove of Jen’s side-sleeping body, reached my hand out to her shoulder.
“Please don’t,” the voice said, quiet and crystalline.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“No.”
“Oh…”
She rolled away from me, facing the other side of the bed.
I said, “What were you doing if you weren’t sleeping?”
“I was thinking.”
“What about?”
I said, “Sweetie? Talk to me. Please.”
“Do you have any idea how much you embarrassed me tonight? Showing up like that, obviously drunk, slurring your words, and then what you actually did say—or didn’t! All your evasiveness, like you’d been forced to submit to a police investigation.”
I rested my hand again, almost imperceptibly, on Jen’s shoulder.
“Please, Eli.”
“I want to explain myself. I want to feel close to you…It’s like—I don’t know—you want your life to be worthy of the person you love. You want an equal exchange, an equal merger of lives going into something like this, and I’m just not there right now. I’m not even close. I have these days where it all becomes painfully apparent to me, how much time I’ve wasted, how little I have to show for what I’ve done. Today was one of those days. It’s not an excuse, I know, and I am sorry. Genuinely. I’ll write a note to your parents tomorrow.”
“Don’t. That’ll just bring more attention to it.”
“Tell me what to do then. Tell me what to do.”
“Why did you even propose to me, Eli? Why did you let me say yes?”
“A girl like Jennifer Daugherty you’ve got to lock down.”
“No. No quips. If you can’t say it straight—”
“This is a lifelong relationship. I wanted you to know that. And it is—it is. You do know that, don’t you? You have to. Jen?”
At length she reached up and took my hand. I got under the covers as she gathered it to her breast, the steep rise and fall of her back against my shirted chest. We’d be okay, I told her. I promised we’d be okay, pulling her in close to me, being pulled, my arm held to Jen’s waist with a sudden animal force, a boa constriction to force our love out into the open air where we could catch and keep it, trap it alive.
“Do you promise?” Jen was whispering. “Do you promise me?”
“I promise,” I said. “I promise we’ll be okay.”
One other point to pick up from the dinner that night, with Jen’s mother asking the questions—Evelyn, who’d also wanted to know about my dissertation and my plans for the academic job market, and who’d balked when I turned her questions aside so glibly, something I regret now. The truth is I’d given up on academia altogether. I’d started looking for other jobs, halfheartedly at first, in the short term, with my grad school funding running down. I knew an eighth year at Randolph was basically out of the question, and when Hahn confirmed this to me I took it more or less in stride. I did get a little chippy with her, which is something else I regret.
“I thought you knew the end was nigh,” Hahn said to me, at lunch this time. “I figured you must have known.”
“No, I didn’t,” I lied.
“Well, are you even close to finishing?”
“You know I’m not.”
Hahn explained that if I could somehow finish my dissertation over the summer the department might just see its way clear to a final extension of funding while I went out on the academic market. But just that phrase in Hahn’s mouth—the academic market!
I was all the more determined to seek my money elsewhere—skipping ahead to the stopgap economy, then, to the indignities of a job search in the late-capitalist city. I’d applied already to the Strand and McNally Jackson, and later I tried Greenlight Bookstore, BookCourt, WORD, Housing Works Bookstore, Barnes & Noble (four of them in two boroughs), Kaplan Test Prep Center, Central Park Tutors, Huntington Learning Center, Brooklyn Roasting Company, the Queens Kickshaw, Ninth Street Espresso, Applebee’s (three of them in three boroughs), TGI Friday’s (two in two), Mike the Glazier, Sasha’s Framing and Supplies, Gotham Carpet Cleaners, Starbucks—a month, a month and a half of my life, not to mention the job applications I’m probably forgetti
ng. I did get a quick call back from a slow-voiced Starbucks manager, but I let the message languish. I was waiting on too many others, I told myself, but really I could see how it would go: the studious distance on the faces of the mock-busy clerks, their neutral smiles as I described my long-ago experience in retail, leaving behind my applications just in case. Thanks, sure, they’d see what they could do…
Apparently tip jobs were out, too. You needed to know somebody, Mallory said. She knew that much from experience. One night over takeout Indian I asked her about her job as a paralegal at a midtown law office, the job that had helped her afford the nicer place she and Jen now rented together, the two-bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the sometimes fortress of politesse. If we’d gone straight three-ways on the rent, I’d have come up empty-pockets in no time. Not that Jen had asked me to three-ways the rent, and not that I’d made my discomfort explicit—another long story, ages long, I suppose, stretching back at least as far as Abraham and Isaac and all the other patriarchs. How that foolishness clings to a man!
I was asking Mal about her paralegal job. What exactly did it entail? What did it pay? Did she like her boss—bosses? What?
“Oh, no, I’m not laughing at you,” she said, “I’m laughing at me. The pay’s pretty bad when you think of all the work you take home, all the extra hours you put in. Your boss is pretty much anyone in the office with a law degree, which means you work for a wide and impressive variety of assholes. I’d say the best preparation for paralegal work is a major in vocal performance and a crushing amount of student debt. Or maybe a gambling problem? That could work too.”
Impish and thin-faced, her brown-green eyes spaced just a breath too wide apart, or maybe it was the way her long nose spread out very suddenly into the broader delta of her brows—but there was something slightly alien in Mallory’s look, over-evolved, knowing. Mal Mallory. She was bad cop to Jen’s good on most nights, and on most nights that took some doing. They goaded each other to heights of greater and greater outrageousness.
The Radicals Page 10